Had US Marines not invaded Haiti, Charlemagne Peralte might have become a politician instead of a revolutionary. His father, General Remi Massena Peralte, was a big landowner in Hinche who had served as a Member of Parliament during the Hypollite administration, known for public works like the Marché Hypollite (Marché-en-Fer, or Iron Market). Charlemagne had become a career army officer after completing his studies at Port-au-Prince’s well-reputed St. Louis de Gonzague college. At 29-years old, he was the Military Commander in Leogane when a group of Marines arrived on Monday August 30, 1915 to disarm that post as part of their project to replace Haiti’s Revolutionary Army with a US-controlled Gendarmerie (FAd’H). Peralte refused to surrender his weapons and national flag and told the Marines he would obey only his President’s orders.

Roosevelt’s “pretty good little constitution”

Peralte returned to a life of farming in Hinche after his dismissal from the Army, and for a while it looked as though his refusal to relinquish his flag would be his only act of resistance to the foreign invasion. Meanwhile, the US labored to legitimize the Occupation. Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) would later boast that, as Woodrow Wilson’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy,“I wrote Haiti’s Constitution myself, and if I do say it, it was a pretty good little Constitution.” Among many measures favorable to the US, this constitution permitted foreign ownership of Haitian lands for the first time since the country’s independence.

The Haitian legislature countered FDR by drafting a stronger document that, not only preserved all protections from the previous Constitution, but also invalidated Dartiguenave’s 1915 treaty with the US and called for his impeachment. As the legislators prepared to ratify this new constitution in early 1917, Dartiguenave and Major General Smedley Butler declared the Parliament dissolved because of “the spirit of anarchy which animates it.” Thus began a 13-year period with no legislature, continuous martial law, and siphoning off of 40 percent of Haiti’s gross domestic product by US financiers. The Gendarmerie collected the taxes to service the foreign debt, dispensed all central government funds, and even served as judges in criminal and civil cases. In addition, they supplied the US with intelligence and got rich from extortion and kickbacks.

Our Charlemagne

On the night of October 11, 1917, on the pretext that Charlemagne and Saul Peralte had attacked their local headquarters, a group of Gendarmes torched Charlemagne’s house, looted Saul’s residence and arrested the two brothers. After a summary court martial, Saul was executed, and Charlemagne was sentenced to five years of hard labor. By then, chain gangs had become commonplace in Haiti, where the US had introduced them as the main source of labor for road building and other public works. Peralte spent nearly a year in menial, physically-wearing jobs, in prison clothes and shaven head, in the city of Cap Haitien where many of his family members lived, before a friend helped him to escape by giving him refuge and supplying him with a disguise.

Within a month Peralte recruited over 200 rebels from the ranks of laboring and escaped convicts, who swore to “drive the Americans back into the sea.” They became known as the “Cacos.” Initially, they fought with vintage guns and swords from the Haitian Revolution, plus hunting rifles, machetes, and knives, but they quickly acquired modern weapons and ammunition by raiding the remote outposts of the Gendarmerie. As a rule, they attacked the enemy in surprise commando operations and used guerilla tactics that favored their mastery of the difficult terrain, particularly along the border of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Their numbers grew to include many Dominicans, won over to the anti-imperialist cause by Peralte. Soon Mirebalais schoolteacher Benoît Batraville joined the command. After a few months of battle, Battraville controlled the Artibonite region, and Peralte declared a provisional government in northern Haiti.

A revolution was clearly under way that the corrupt Gendarmerie could not hold off. But even as new tanks, seaplanes, airplanes, airports, and Marines reinforced the campaign against Cacos, they were called “bandits” and “highwaymen.” To demolish all pretext of banditry, in 1918 Charlemagne Péralte issued a public call to arms to the people of Haiti; he additionally wrote a letter to the French Minister in Haiti, signed by himself and 100 others, that was a formal declaration of war against the US. The Haitian elite, to whom the most serious insult of the occupation was its exclusion from White society due to racial prejudice, berated the Cacos for threatening the public safety by drawing fire on all Blacks from undiscerning Marines. By contrast, so many peasants joined the Cacos that, by 1919, the force became more than 40,000-men strong and engaged the Marines over 60 times a month.

Popping off Cacos

Flying missions from the new airports became more frequent. Cacos were bombed if they could be found. And if they could not, villages were razed. During military engagements with the Cacos, the custom was to administer a bullet to the head of any wounded Haitian. Those caught uninjured were usually tortured and lynched. Such practices are consistent with official “anti-banditry” campaign documents, which are rife with reports of high Haitian casualties without prisoners, along with few or no American deaths. Stories of Marine atrocities became so widespread that James Weldon Johnson and others traveled to Haiti to check their veracity. Johnson’s NAACP delegation confirmed: “it has now become the duty and sport of American marines to hunt these ‘cacos’ with rifles and machine guns.” For the most part, these assaults were not on Cacos but random civilians. The Cacos territories in Haiti’s North and Artibonite regions could not be taken without major casualties to the Marines.

In Summer 1919, US authorities secretly launched a project to kill Peralte, whom they called “the Supreme Bandit.” This mission was headed by Marine Sergeant Herman H. Hanneken, an expert at cultivating spies among Haiti’s elite. He found Jean Baptiste Conzé: a vain Caco lieutenant who could be bought for $2,000 in cash and the promise of the rank of officer (exclusively the domain of White Americans) in the Gendarmerie. On the evening of October 31, 1919, Conzé smuggled Hanneken and Corporal William R. Button, both in black face, together with 18 Gendarmes into a Cacos camp near Grande Riviere du Nord, where Peralte sat by a fire. Hanneken shot two bullets at close range into Peralte’s back, instantly killing him. The rest of the camp — about 1,200 men — was machine gunned in the surprise operation. The next day, before burying Peralte’s body in an unmarked grave, US authorities photographed the corpse tied to a door, with the Haitian flag draped around its head, and then dropped thousands of copies of the photo over the entire country. The reaction was not terror, but revulsion. The majority of Haitians came to view the Occupation as a project of “savages” and Peralte as a martyr for Haiti’s sovereignty.

Return of the flag

With Battraville’s death the following May, the Cacos’ strength greatly diminished, but student strikes and worker’s revolts became common. One notorious peasant protest in Les Cayes, in December 1929, which left 12 killed and 23 wounded by US Marines, provoked outrage from nearly all Haitian society. Loud calls for US departure were echoed by organizations like the suffragettes and NAACP. In addition, a shortage of investors, due to the stock market crash and Great Depression, made Haiti more difficult to colonize. Finally US President Herbert Hoover agreed to send his own fact-finding commissions to Haiti, which confirmed yet more atrocities, including widespread torture, a system of preventive detention, and the routine theft of Haitian property by US Marines. Hoover accepted the commissions’ recommendations to withdraw. Legislative and presidential elections were organized so as to return Haiti to political autonomy. On July 5, 1934, FDR returned to Haiti as US President to recognize Haitian independence, and by mid-August the national flag was flying again. Around the same period, Péralte’s remains were discovered with the help of a former Gendarme who had participated in his burial. Peralte was honored in Cap Haitien on November 26, 1934, with a state funeral attended by his mother, a large national corps, and a massive crowd.

Haiti’s endless revolution

Haiti cannot return to a quiet agricultural life any more than Peralte could. There is no such thing as a quiet life of farming. It is a life of back-breaking, unappreciated work that must be earned by a continuous fight against weeds, pests, and predators. After the first US Occupation, Haiti’s financial subservience to US banks persisted until 1945 when Dumarsais Estimé, possibly Haiti’s greatest President since the men who fought the Slave Revolution, concluded the repayment of the debt, reformed the education system to teach history and other subjects from a Haitian viewpoint, and helped to develop the Artibonite Valley into a major area for rice cultivation. But Estimé tried to dodge the most important fight of all: that against the FAd’H, and ultimately he was forced into exile by a US-backed army coup. Francois Duvalier is the only president to have successfully defeated the FAd’H. He did so by assembling his own parallel peasant army of the Tontons Macoutes. His administration is rightly vilified for having tolerated no dissent (from the communist left or the US-backed right), but it should also be acknowledged for having returned Haiti to independence and self sufficiency. All subsequent administrations, starting with Jean-Claude Duvalier, have welcomed aid and plunged the country back into debt, even as the agricultural sector, which had always repaid for Haiti’s follies, was dismantled by USAID. Jean-Bertrand Aristide did disband the FAd’H in 1995, but the absence of even an armed militia left Haiti defenseless against another foreign invasion.

The current Occupation of Haiti is cruder than the last. The US has learned not to molest the symbols of sovereignty as it dismantles the real thing. For example, the 1987 Constitution has not formally been changed, but the letter of a series of amendments proposed by Bill Clinton is being systematically followed. Hillary Clinton sends her congratulations on Flag Day to her hand-picked Haitian president. Unbeknownst to most Haitians, the July 28 “Carnaval des Fleurs” celebrates the anniversary of the first US invasion. A relatively prosperous and seemingly patriotic Haitian diaspora has grown, but like the mulatto class of colonial times and Jean-Baptiste Conzé, it appears to be more interested in acquiring an equal status to White colonists than in partnering with Haiti’s peasants. But as Haiti’s peasants go, so too does the country. Haitians must unite, not through providential men and charlatans, but with respect for each other across class lines. All that has been dismantled must be rebuilt, including employment for Haitians, by Haitians, in education, public works, public health, finance, and, most importantly, agriculture. To honor our history and flag, we must break the bondage of debt, shed parasitic aid organizations and stop being a nation of beggars.

Editor’s Note: Photographs one and two by Bio Diversity Library. Photographs ten, eleven and twelve by U.S. Air Force.

By Patricia Malcom Rosenleaf

Vivian sat by her dying boy’s bed, nodding, starting awake, nodding again. She’d been here with him from almost the beginning of this hospital stay because somehow she knew in her heart, he wouldn’t leave — at least alive. She and Floyd, her husband and Mike’s father, had taken turns to begin with, sitting with Mike, but now they both stayed. Mike’s wife drifted in and out, and so did their kids, but they all had jobs and obligations. Vivian’s only obligation now was to her first born, the pride of her life, her son, her friend. Now she stirred, and a line from a comedy routine came back to her: “Cap’n, my butt is dead and the legs ain’t fer behind.” The chairs were initially comfortable, but gradually they sucked the feeling from your posterior as if designed to cause short stays: the kind hospitals ordinarily recommend. She was here for the duration, however.

She switched the hand she was holding with Mike and looked at his decimated face. It was some sort of cancer, they told her — very rare, a melanoma but not quite, almost like AIDS but not quite. He’d been part of a study; he’d had tests done in Boston; the doctors were more or less confounded by the disease and its effect on him. His weight had slowly decreased to where she doubted he weighed a hundred pounds now — down from the strapping, sturdy-framed boy, the handsome man she’d reared and felt more a companion than a son. They’d lived near each other in Alaska, Floyd and Mike working together at times. When Mike and his family moved to Hawaii, Floyd and Vivian followed for long periods. Even then, he was sick, but the Hawaiian sun had staved off the illness. Mike would lie out in the heat of the day, soaking in the sun, which in some way seemed to heal him. He’d even returned to work for a while, but then his wife (and Vivian would never forgive her for it) grew homesick for “her people.” She wanted to move back to the mainland, and she chose Utah — where the winters could be cruel and the sun sometimes only vaguely shone for stretches of days. There’d be no more lying in the sun for Mike, and he quickly became sicker with each passing day. He’d been back and forth, into and out of the hospital until this last time: what Vivian called “the long haul.”

It was fitting that the sun had been so healing. When she thought of Mike as a child, she thought of him in tones of gold and brown, his skin a deep tan, his intense brown eyes snapping, his beautiful white teeth gleaming against the darkness of his skin. She thought of the time when Mike had tripped on the step and fallen face-first onto the stoop. Aside from the fat lip, he’d chipped a front tooth, but even that had only lent to his handsomeness the way a small scar on a man’s face will.

It made him at once less pretty and more handsome; the chip was small and from then on when he smiled, while you might notice the chip, his smile took on a rakishness that became him. He was always an outside boy, preferring the fields around their ranch to any school room. When they’d moved to town, he’d still found ways to be outside; it was as if he sought the sun always. He hired out to the local ranchers during haying season; he’d sooner dig a ditch than go to school; but, of course, his parents had insisted he attend, and he did, graduating from high school and immediately going into the construction field where he could be outside. He could drive any truck or manage any machinery; he could fix them too. He was a clever kid. Her heart came near to bursting at the thought of him as a child and a young man. His black hair and brows set against his flawless skin, his brilliant smile — all made him a favorite of the town girls. It wasn’t long before he and his girlfriend Peggy showed up to announce that she was pregnant. They’d get married soon, they speculated; and Vivian and Floyd had given them their blessing. What else do you do? He certainly was a man now, and though she had her doubts about his judgement, his life was his to form. Peggy and he had had that baby, and soon there were two more. They were awfully young, and Vivian wasn’t too surprised when she began hearing the stories of how much they drank and how many parties they attended. The two boys and their girl were frequent visitors at Floyd and Vivian’s house. They, neither one, were that old, and they had lots of energy for these first grandchildren– they welcomed them. Vivian and Floyd were pragmatists if nothing else — you simply bent and flowed and accepted. It was their way, the only way they knew. Vivian could say little; she’d been a wild young girl herself. Floyd had shown up at their farmhouse, a traveling salesman — he’d sold her tough old mother nothing, but he stole Vivian’s heart. So she and Floyd had been married; they were young, and the union was against her parents’ wishes, but their disapproval had mattered little to her: she’d found her man, and she knew they’d be all right. And they had been. They’d moved a lot, garnered little in the way of possessions, held various jobs — backbreaking, mind-numbing at times — but their family had been their rock. First the golden child Mike, his comely sister Susan and when little Kelly was born, almost an after thought, they’d been complete. Vivian cared little that they went without, that they often moved, that they left behind possessions. It was family that mattered. The new baby Kelly was as round and happy as a baby could be. This was what life was all about, thought Vivian, as she held the little bundle close — she thanked God for His bounty to her.

For a while, they’d prospered, even building their dream home at the top of a new addition in Livingston, where the wind blew so hard that their screen doors had to be built on runners rather than opening in and out as doors were supposed to do. They’d been happy there, but jobs of their sort didn’t last: the sawmills lay off workers, restaurants close, the railroad no longer needed Floyd’s time. They lost the house and moved to Alaska. Soon Mike and his family moved there too; there’d been a divorce and the wife was new along with several of her own children, but Vivian and Floyd had welcomed them too, and their family circle grew. This was the time, which Vivian remembered with great happiness since they were all together in a fairly close group, Mike and his new family just a few miles down the road, Susan and her family in town, Kelly living with them for the time being. Then Mike began complaining of his skin. He’d showed his mother the sores, and sometimes he could barely walk for the pain on the soles of his feet; any rough fabric on his back caused agony.

The doctor put it off to poor shoes at first, and then poor circulation, and finally he just shrugged and told Mike he needed to see a specialist.

In Alaska then, there were few specialists, so Mike made an appointment in Seattle, flew down, and spent several days going through a myriad of tests and office visits. The specialist had been confounded too. It would probably go away, the Seattle doctor advised — just give it time, he said. Mike had flown back, gritted his teeth, determined to wait this thing out. It niggled at Vivian’s mind — Mike just didn’t seem right. Any time she was around him, she could see the misery in his eyes; he lost weight; soon he more resembled his wiry father than her sturdy Scotch side. His hair thinned, the beautiful black curls were gone, but then his dad was bald too, had been for years. The hair loss might not have hurt, but Mike was hurting. He tried the doctor again, only this time he made an appointment in Seattle with an oncologist. Vivian and Floyd took the kids, and Mike’s wife flew with him. What followed — the lack of a diagnosis let alone a prognosis — was a black hole in Vivian’s mind. All she knew was that her boy was in pain and nobody seemed to know what to do about it. He was accepted into an experimental program in Boston to which he flew and where he stayed for months. Upon his return, the grim look on his face told it all: the doctors couldn’t put a name to it, but they knew this much: Mike was dying. They advised him to move someplace sunny, as Mike had mentioned that the only relief he felt from the agony of his skin was when he was in the sun. Soon after his return to Alaska, he and his wife and kids moved to Hawaii. For a while the condition abated. Mike and his new wife adopted two more children, their family swelling to five, with Mike’s first three living with their mother in Montana. Floyd and Vivian soon found their way to Hawaii where their help and companionship were welcomed. Floyd found a job driving a bus; Vivian took care of the house and children while Mike and Claudia worked. The sunny, warm days of Hawaii were balm to Vivian’s soul as well as to Mike’s health. She envisioned them spending the rest of their days there — close to Mike and his family. Susan and Kelly stayed in Alaska, but because Kelly worked for an airline there, they were able to visit often inexpensively. Then came the rumblings from Claudia about “missing her folks, her people.”

“Good Lord!” Vivian had exclaimed to Floyd, “If you needed to stay in a place for your health, I’d be there with you and not moaning about my family.” But she’d said nothing to Claudia, and Mike seemed acquiescent about the impending move. “She’s not happy here, Mom,” he’d explained.

“But you’re happy here,” Vivian had protested.

“I know, but I don’t want another wrecked marriage.” he’d replied.

“She’s miserable here.”

“How can she be miserable in paradise?” Vivian had wondered aloud to Floyd. But Mike had seemed better of late; maybe the move would not affect him. Once again, they flowed, they bent, they accepted. Vivian and Floyd prepared to move back to the mainland too, having sold their Alaska house and acreage. Maybe they’d move to Anchorage to be close to Susan and her family. Vivian didn’t like the idea of spending much time in Utah. She was still angry with Claudia, and such feelings didn’t make for good neighbors. It wasn’t long though before, through phone calls and letters, Vivian discovered that her high hopes for Mike’s recovery were ill-founded. He began another round of doctors and hospital stays. By the time Mike had been put into the hospital three times, Vivian and Floyd had sold most of their possessions, given up their jobs, bade goodbye to Susan and Kelly and headed to Utah in their new twenty-foot pull trailer. They found a year-round campground and set up their home, dedicating their time to Mike.

Now Vivian felt Mike’s hand stir and looked up to see him cocking his head, listening intently for who might be in the room. One of the effects of the disease had been to attack his eyes, those beautiful brown orbs that had brought her such a swell of heart when they lighted on her.

Now they were glued shut: “SuperGlue,” the doctor had explained when he came to do the procedure. “It’s fabulous stuff; it doesn’t hurt, and he’ll be much more comfortable than he was with those weeping eyes.” The damned saw bones, she thought, acts as if he invented the stuff. She’d stood by as he rimmed Mike’s sightless rheumy eyes with the liquid and squeezed then shut. The finality of never seeing his eyes again just presaged the finality of what was about to happen. She steeled herself as she bent over Mike’s body, “How’re you doin’?” she asked.

Mike smiled slightly at the sound of his mother’s voice. Even with all the weight loss, he still had his dimples, his darling dimples, she thought.

“I’m all right,” he replied. “My mouth feels like the Russian army marched through it.”

Vivian reached over and brought the Vaseline bottle to hand. She took a bit on the end of her finger and rubbed Mike’s mouth with it. “Do you want some mouth wash?” she queried.

But already he was asleep again. That tiny bit of comfort was enough to buy him more sleep, but it had also worn him out. Soon enough she knew, he would not wake up, but would slip into that nether world of coma and from there away from the confines of the earth. She didn’t want the time to hasten, as she could not stand the thought of losing him. On the other hand, to watch someone you love suffer such misery was a type of hell all its own. How could she NOT wish him dead, she thought. To buy him health, she would have given her own life. She’d offered herself to God on more than one occasion in the past weeks. One should simply not outlive one’s child, she thought. It is against all nature! Her thoughts returned to her own mother and her biting words, uttered once in anger after Vivian had pushed her too far: “I wish it had been you, and not my Mae who’d died.” Through all the years, Vivian had been aghast at her mother’s outburst, but she began to see what the old lady might have been about. She wouldn’t wish such a death on any of her children, but for God to take Mike was too big a sacrifice; her mother had felt the same. Mothers may try to be neutral and equal in their love, but secretly, and even interchangeably at times, mothers will have favorites.

She glanced over to her husband as she straightened up; Floyd had a grasp on Mike’s other hand, and he sat with tears brimming his eyes. “I can’t stand life without him,” he sniffed. “He was my partner, my son. Why won’t God take me instead? I’m old; it’s my time!” At that, he released his hold of his son’s hand and wept. To see her man cry after the many disappointments they’d faced tore at her heart. Here was the most grievous of all — pregnant daughters, mixed-up grandchildren, thoughtless relatives — nothing seemed even near this pain. I’ll never live through this, she thought almost hopefully. Let me die with him, but her heart was good, her voice strong; she was not to gain that wish any time soon. She’d read a poem during her stay here from one of those volumes that seem to pop up in waiting rooms and untended libraries. The poem by Robert Frost was entitled “Home Burial”; in it a mother tries to come to terms with the death of her little boy, her first born. Vivian remembered the line “The nearest friends can go with anyone to death, comes so far short / They might as well not try to go at all.” How true, thought Vivian. She felt a kinship with her now-dead mother that she’d never felt before. She supposed that such experiences are the life binders for the generations. She recalled that Mike had belonged to a cancer survivor group for a while, and he would come home almost aglow. “It’s so wonderful to talk to someone who’s been there.” The relief in his face would sometimes last for days.

After a while, Vivian glanced out the window. The hospital was beautifully landscaped, and she watched as the trees bent and flowed with and accepted the wind.

Editor’s Notes: Patricia Malcolm Rosenleaf is a retired educator who recently published a novel, Stone Garden.  Her particular interests include liberal politics, animal welfare, education, and US and world news.  You may find Pat on FaceBook, LinkedIn, and at the blog site she created for her local union, Education Matters. This story is a finalist in the News Junkie Post short-story competition. The competition is still open; submit your entry. Photographs one, four and six by Kent Campbell; photographs five, seven and eight by Kevin Dooley; photograph two by Gilbert Mercier.

After more than a century sailing along as an independent black nation, Haiti collided with the Monroe Doctrine in the form of the National City Bank of New York. Together with the US State Department, Citibank pressured Haiti’s government to sell it 40 percent of the Banque National d’Haïti (BNH): Haiti’s treasury. Thus the US acquired a financial interest in Haiti’s $32 million public debt and the pretext for an invasion.

Roger L. Farnham: US kingmaker, Monroe doctrinaire

The architect behind the US scheme to control Haiti’s treasury was wealthy American kingmaker and Woodrow Wilson personal friend Roger Farnham, who became the BNH’s vice president after the takeover. Mr. Farnham was also Citibank’s vice president and president of the National Railway of Haiti: two companies that had swindled Haiti out of more $5 million for a national railroad that was never completed. Citibank and W.R. Grace had financed the project, which the Haitian government had guaranteed at an interest of six percent on $32,500 per mile.

When the Haitian government balked at continuing to support the railroad project, Farnham determined to get Haiti into a customs receivership. He alternately threatened the country’s politicians with a direct US intervention or personal punishments, like withholding of their salaries. Haiti’s lawmakers refused to pay. Six different presidents between 1908-1915 (a politically tumultuous period) also refused to allow the US to collect customs duties to pay the debt owed to Citibank, despite threats that the US would not recognize their administrations.

In 1914, Farnham whisked away to New York, aboard the USS Machias, two strongboxes with roughly 24,000 ounces of Haiti’s gold, valued at $40 million today, and he deposited them into the Citibank vaults. This theft of hard currency rendered Haiti completely dependent on the US for its operating budget. Protests by the Haitian government were to no avail. Farnham did not stop there. With the outbreak of World War I, he changed his rhetoric to a call for neutralization of the “threat” posed to the US by Haiti’s French and Germans residents: in reality a small group of well-assimilated business people.

The opportunity for an invasion came on July 27, 1915 when Haiti’s president was dragged out from the French embassy by an angry mob and dismembered in the streets for having ordered 167 of his imprisoned political opponents assassinated. US President Wilson simultaneously dispatched 330 Marines to the island, who arrived in Port-au-Prince the next day. After declaring martial law, “the first thing [the Marines] did was take the customs and tax collection office. The occupation army retained the Haitian president’s salary until he resigned himself to sign the liquidation of the Banque Nationale d’Haiti, which became a branch of Citibank in New York.”

Irksome shackles of civilization

United States news writers merely repeated Wilson’s command to the Marines “to re-establish peace and order” and the government’s view that a Black nation could not govern itself and had degenerated into chaos. Wilson’s own Secretary of State Robert Lansing said: “The African races are devoid of any capacity for political organization [and possess] an inherent tendency to revert to savagery and to cast aside the shackles of civilization which are irksome to their physical nature.”

Such ideas persist today in the narrative about the first US occupation of Haiti because they have so often been repeated. By contrast, there is scant mention of the US invasions, not only Haiti, but also of Nicaragua, Mexico, Cuba, and Panama during Wilson’s 1912-1920 presidency. Mr. Wilson would receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1920 for his pacifism during WWI, despite his declaration of war on Germany in April 1917 and pressures on Haiti to join the US in this war declaration. Again, the Haitian government had refused.

Ultimately the US found a pliant, cowardly Haitian in the person of Sudre Dartiguenave. The order to select him for president came to Admiral Caperton on August 9, 1915 in a US Navy Department telegram: “Allow election of President to take place whenever Haitians wish. The United States prefers election of Dartiguenave….” The legislature’s intimidation was enforced by Smedley Butler who later wrote: “When the National Assembly met, the Marines stood in the aisles with their bayonets until the man selected by the American Minister was made President.”

Dartiguenave signed a treaty on November 11, 1915 to:

• Allow the appointment of a US High Commissioner of Haiti (General John H. Russell) to run the country alongside the Haitian President.
• Create a financial advisers’ office, plus public works and public health services headed by Wilson-designated US nationals.
• Permit customs receivership for 20 years, with Roger Farnham as the receiver for the National Railroad of Haiti. Thus Farnham took over all of Haiti’s railway system and territorial concessions.
• Not transfer Haitian territory to any country other than the US.
• Disband Haiti’s army and create the Gendarmerie d’Haiti (later, the Forces Armees d’Haiti, FAd’H): a US-led force of 3,000 Haitian men who would answer to the US Secretary of State.

William J. Clinton: US High Commissioner of Haiti

Today the US plan for Haiti is unchanged. It is still justified by the notion that Blacks cannot govern themselves but couched in inoffensive expressions like “humanitarian aid” and “peacekeeping force.” Former US President Bill Clinton has assumed the role of US High Commissioner of Haiti, and Michel Martelly is the new Sudre Dartiguenave. Haiti’s control of its finances, public works, and public health services has effectively been removed from the hands of its nationals and transferred to non-governmental organizations (NGO) of largely US-origin, under the aegis of USAID. All of the country’s mayors have been dismissed so that its territory might be more easily transferred, under control of the US, to multinational corporations for gold mining, road works, hydroelectricity, tourism, and other projects. Although the US Marines did kill numerous Fanmi Lavalas partisans in the aftermath of the 2004 coup against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the occupying military force is no longer the Marines but a US-controlled UN force that is gradually being replaced by US mercenaries and a renewed FAd’H.

Will Haiti relinquish its sovereignty without a fight this time? The story of Haitian resistance to the first US occupation is hardly ever told, but as early as Summer 1915, well before Haiti’s politicians had capitulated to the US, a new Haitian revolution had started. It began on Monday, August 30, 1915, when a group of US marines went to the District of Leogane to try to collect Military Commander Charlemagne Peralte’s weapons and national flag.

Once again, Israel bombed Syria, ostensibly to destroy weapons meant for Hezbollah. Instead, the air strike on Saturday, May 4, 2013 killed 15 troops from Bashar al-Assad’s elite Republican Guard, together with more than 100 other Syrian soldiers. As Russia, China and the United States scrambled for a solution to the conflict in Syria that threatens to turn into a regional sectarian war, Russia Today Television (RT TV) called on News Junkie Post Editor-in-Chief Gilbert Mercier to analyze the geopolitics of the situation.

Mercier cautioned that “Israel is playing with fire” and explained that he thinks they are testing “the international community to see how they are going to react. According to various Washington sources, the attack on Saturday wasn’t green-lit by the White House. They were not even consulted…. Apparently it is a complete fait accompli. They might be testing the waters to see how the international community would move if [Israel] would attack Iran….”

He pointed out that the attack has won the sympathy of Turkey, “which is mainly a Sunni country and not a friend of the Assads. [Turkish Prime Minister] Erdogan basically stated that the attack by Israel was absolutely unacceptable, and this is [seconded] by the opposition in Syria.”

When asked about the possible outcomes of today’s meeting between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Levrov and United States Secretary of State John Kerry, Mercier proposed that “The international community should look into… a potential balkanization of Syria: perhaps splitting the… Alawite, Sunni, and Kurd areas into three parts, following the model of the former Yugoslavia…. Nobody has really considered this, and it could be a way out. Otherwise, the 1.2 million Alawites — providing Assad falls — would become very likely victims of a genocide.”

Regarding the claims of chemical weapons in Syria, Mercier said that the “deja vu of Iraq… doesn’t fly too well with the international community,” although the US insists that it just wants to make sure it is right on the chemical weapons issue. He also noted the implied threat against Assad in President Barack Obama’s comparison today of possible plans for Syria to previous US actions against Osama Bin Laden and Muammar Gaddafi.

Mercier warns that Israel is “trying to provoke Hezbollah into a retaliation…” but appears not to have considered that it cannot “handle a front against Lebanon and a front against Syria at the same time.”

Editor’s Note: Photograph by AFP/HO/SANA

Consider the following two “criminals”:

Abu Qatada

Let us assume for a moment that Abu Qatada has committed crimes in Jordan, though much evidence suggests otherwise. Mr. Qatada has committed no crime in the United Kingdom. So, even if he was a criminal abroad, he fits the Christian example of a reformed character and, providing he continues to live lawfully, should be forgiven. What appears to irritate Mrs. May as much as anything is that Mr. Qatada has called for the release of Muslims held in United States prisons and Guantanamo Bay, which gets him labeled a preacher of hatred. Most of the prisoners for whom he advocates have been held for 11 years without charge, never mind without trial. I too, together with many others in the UK, have called for the release of these prisoners. So why have I not been arrested? I would suggest that what makes my case different is that I am a white Christian and consequently fall outside of Mrs. May’s racist profile.

Abu Qatada is a family man. His family has been subjected to racist abuse from right-wing extremists, but his children are model pupils, and his family is respected elsewhere. When they were abused, due largely to a media campaign against Qatada, no authorities intervened to protect them. The family suffered silently for a long time before getting an injunction to stop the abuse. All this has resulted from slanderous accusations made in support of the war on Islam by previous governments and, more recently and fervently, by Theresa May in pushing forward her fixation to send Abu Qatada to Jordan to face trial. Jordan is reputed for torture, and Mr. Qatada belonged to an opposition party before the present dictatorship; he also has no great excess of money.

Now if Qatada were as wealthy as a United Arab Emirates’ oil-sheikh, the racism against him would probably be kept in check. The nipple through which money flows is the one at which the authorities suck, and while the cash keeps flowing in, it matters little whether the breast is black, brown or white. Thus criminal oligarchs from Russia, former Soviet states and elsewhere, may bring their filthy lucre to the UK and get it washed free from stains at the laundry of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street. The world’s mafia can afford to buy off accusations of wrongdoing, and Mrs. May, being married to a banker, can only empathize. The divide is not about rich and poor, so much as the gaping crevice between a white alleged criminal settler such as Shaun Patrick Breach and a Palestinian like Abu Qatada — who is derogatorily called a radical Islamic cleric. It is also about how differently the Home Secretary and her authorities treat each man.

Shaun Patrick Breach

It is hard not to go looking in the Dictionary of Abusive Slang to find a fitting epithet to describe Shaun Patrick Breach with any degree of accuracy. Before coming to the UK from South Africa, Breach had allegedly been a mercenary for the notorious Executive Outcomes, though this is denied by the former controllers of this corporation. Before its demise, Executive Outcomes had at its helm right-wing fixers like Tony Buckingham, Simon Mann and Tim Spicer, whose former antics in Africa and, in the case of Buckingham and Spicer, current ones in oil-rich countries destabilized by NATO, were sketched in a recent article. Breach is different altogether. While most of the top men have kept their nefarious activities under cover, Breach seems to wallow in his crimes, and he appears to be, or thinks himself as being, untouchable.

Shaun Patrick Breach is an alleged serial wife-beater. He has been accused of trying to knife journalist Simon Tomlin, who was and might still be investigating his activities. Despite repeated requests, and despite the attack on Tomlin being monitored by CCTV cameras, the Nottinghamshire police has refused to stop and search Breach for weapons. He appears to be able to commit crimes with impunity, provoking the question: why? What information does Breach hold to render him above the law? He lives in Nottingham, a place that some might describe as England’s equivalent to the Chicago of the 1930s. Nottingham is reputed to be a gangster-ridden, drug-running, gun-toting place, with some of the police allegedly being in cahoots with the gangsters. What is even more astounding is that many of the locals seem to know who the bent coppers are.

Despite being arrested in the UK more than 40 times for crimes ranging from witness intimidation to death-threats — including racist attacks — Breach has usually been released without charge and never been imprisoned. Simon Tomlin believes that Breach has been protected by the police and security services as a useful asset. This could be right, since no mainstream journalist has covered this story of police cover up, and if Shaun Patrick Breach is an asset, the mainstream media would not be allowed to go public with this information. Thus Simon Tomlin seems to be taking on Nottinghamshire police almost single handedly, and recordings suggest that Tomlin’s account of Breach’s psychotic knife attack is correct. So what is an alleged South African criminal with British Nationalist Party leanings doing in the UK, given Theresa May’s policy of returning suspected criminals to their homelands, or to countries where they are wanted for allegedly breaking the law?

One cannot help but conclude that Theresa May is racist. She has targeted Abu Qatada, who has committed no crime in the UK, but not Shaun Patrick Breach, who has probably committed many. Breach was protected by the law and police, whereas Qatada and his family were not. There is no evidence that Qatada has been anything but a good family man; by contrast, Breach has been accused of beating all three wives he has had, and other women too. Why doesn’t the Home Secretary do Breach’s current wife a favor and send the self-acclaimed mercenary back to South Africa, and stop picking on Qatada? Of course the above interpretation of what has been seen and read could be wrong. If so, perhaps Mrs. May could explain how these allegations are false.

Editor’s Note: All photographs by UK Home Office.

The BBC’s announcement of the construction of a new nuclear power station is part of the mainstream media’s agenda. The French company to whom the contract has been granted, Electricité de France (EDF), cannot just start construction without local people asking questions. What is more likely to be manufactured news came shortly afterwards: two days after the BBC story came a further announcement that Sellafield nuclear power station in Cumbria was being shut down on safety grounds due to weather conditions.[2] Two nuclear power-station stories in a week is a bit suspicious even for those who accept the news as presented. Although there had been an unseasonal fall of snow for March, it had been no different, in fact less severe, than many other wintry snowfalls when the power station was not closed. The timing of this Sellafield story seemed incredible, coming directly after the announcement of a new nuclear power station; the story reeked of being a bit too much of a coincidence. To anybody used to reading between the lines, it is unlikely that the closure was simply due to snow. So what was the story’s purpose?

The plan, or hidden agenda, if followed through might have been to deprive households over a large area of northern England of their electricity during a cold spell. Had the closure lasted, there was a high probability that families would have been left without heating or lighting just to prove how dependent we really are on nuclear energy. This is one possibility. The other is to demonstrate how safety-conscious nuclear facilities are – all of a sudden. The shut down came two days after the announcement of a new plant, yet Sellafield has never closed down because of weather. The only reason nuclear plants shut down is for accidents, or perhaps maintenance. Accidents are different. There was an accident in 1957, which pushed the Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson to pen these apposite lines:

This is a land where dirt is clean,
And poison pasture, quick and green
And storm sky, bright and bare;
Where sewers flow with milk, and meat
Is carved up for the fire to eat,
And children suffocate in God’s fresh air.[3]

At the time of that leakage, Sellafield did not exist. The plant on the site was known as Windscale, as is Nicholson’s poem. The new facility at Sellafield got a new name to ensure that a gullible public, and those born after 1960, would not associate the Windscale disaster with the Sellafield nuclear power station. Nobody names a ship Titanic any more. Today Windscale is hardly ever mentioned, and new generations are oblivious to the accident, except for those who have learned of it from family members or read about it elsewhere. The incidence of childhood leukemia in the area is still up and the highest in the country. Despite a German study’s link of leukemia to nuclear power plants, a study commissioned by a government advisory committee found no such link.[4]

More recent disasters, like those at Chernobyl and Fukushima, are rarely mentioned when new nuclear power stations are proposed; so presenting a safety facade is essential. What is mentioned is how efficient nuclear energy is. Safety must be a key factor in selling nuclear power to consumers who are increasingly aware of its dangers after those major-scale disasters. Nuclear plants are also needed to produce the latest range of nuclear weapons, which is never mentioned. The irony is that these weapons can penetrate nuclear plants. Think about it: no shut down of Sellafield due to the weather for decades, then one in the same week that a new facility is announced. This must be manufactured news, funded by those most likely to gain financially from the construction of yet another potentially-lethal power plant. Sellafield is being decommissioned. There was an accident: a more recent leak than the Windscale disaster at the Thorp facility in 2005 closed the plant for nearly two years.[5]

The manufactured news did not end with the Sellafield shut down. Within three or four days, a second major ‘manufactured’-energy story hit the headlines. This time it concerned a supposed depletion in the UK’s gas reserves. The purpose of this was to show how we cannot rely on gas. Energy users, who have faced year on year increases in bills, are being asked to believe that the country could be running out of gas – which of course ultimately it is – but the article meant imminently. The prediction on Sunday March 24 was that only 1.4 to 3 days of gas reserves were left, and the United Kingdom had the lowest reserves in all of Europe. All stories mentioned how expensive gas is and how rationing might have to be introduced. At the same time, the general public was asked to accept that there will be increased energy bills again next winter.[6]

In reality, the main problem is that all our energy suppliers are privately-owned conglomerates for whom profit — no let that be greed — is the main motivating factor. Increased profit equals increased bills. There are supposed to be ombudsmen to make sure that consumers get a fair deal. Where and when have customers experienced a reduction in bills? Private energy companies have a responsibility to shareholders that supersedes any responsibility to customers, despite the customers being the ones who pay the extortionate bills. There used to be an economic saying that “the customer is king,” meaning that customers could take their business elsewhere for a better deal. Price fixing and energy cartels have eliminated customer choice.

There was a time in the UK when energy bills rose in proportion to increases in wages and salaries, when families could afford to pay for essential services without undue strain on the rest of the family budget. That was back in the happier days when utilities were publicly owned. Back then, when work needed doing, it was done because the driving force was not profit but safety and the delivery of a responsible service. In our stringent days of private ownership, the average family is crippled by energy bills. Water leakages are ignored for decades. When in dry spells the country sees its water reservoirs fall to their lowest ever levels, this is blamed on increased consumption. Privately-owned industries have no motivation to locate and repair the leaks. Instead hosepipe bans are imposed on householders because this is a much cheaper option than fixing the leaks and does not impinge on profit.

As with water, gas, and other essential industries, the new proposed nuclear power station will also be in private hands. This does not augur well for public safety or the family purse. Shareholders of private companies are not concerned about safety so much as profit, knowing as they do, that while the cash keeps coming in, their lives could not be sweeter. If later something goes badly wrong, like the Fukushima disaster, they can move their money and profits elsewhere, with the added consolation that the taxpayer, as usual, will pick up the bill. That is what happened with banking. There is no possibility with a Conservative, Labor or Liberal government that service industries will return to public ownership. They no longer believe in public ownership. Greed cracks the government whip.

References

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21839684

[2] http://lakelandradio.co.uk/2013/03/bad-weather-forces-sellafield-shutdown/

[3] Nicholson, Norman, A Local Habitation, Faber & Faber, London, 1972, p. 31.

[4] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/may/06/nuclear-power-leukaemia

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellafield

[6] http://peakoil.com/consumption/could-uk-face-gas-rationing-british-gas-reserves-could-run-dry-in-36-hours and http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/britain-faces-the-prospect-of-gas-rationing-for-the-first-time-8544975.html

Editor’s Note: All photographs by Trey Ratcliff.

By Imtiaz Akhtar

Read only those books that inspire suicidal thoughts in you. Books, as I have always believed, are more dangerous than an atomic bomb. A bomb can only kill or maim you, unlike books, which alone can transform you. They can transform you from something baser into something nobler, something higher. A great book reveals you to yourself; it speaks to you about your sins and reminds you of your own faults. A great book is an event in your life. Its greatness lies in its ability to transform you. You willingly or unwillingly undergo a metamorphosis. What is a great book if not a mirror? This is how all that is baser is purged from you. One by one you lose them, you discard them, and you, sitting alone in your room, climb by inches and centimeters the peaks of humanity. Reading is an escape from the world, but paradoxically one finds oneself embracing humanity in the most intense form known ever to the human race. A great book unsettles you, it uproots you as much as travel does. It provokes anxiety on a scale that is devastating. One experiences a mad tempest within. Day becomes a long hopeless evening. Dark clouds on the horizon that until yesterday meant little to you now portend your hasty end. Strange things begin to happen; humans resemble mannequins and mannequins resemble humans. A great book kills a part of your being. But at the same time, it allows a newer being to emerge. The brown bud in you becomes a white rose. It reveals to you great secrets about language itself. By degrees you realize that each word is like a living being. It has its own distinct skin beneath which it exists. How careful one has to be before one learns to play with it. Books are our collective memory; without them we simply cease to exist. We become terrifying as an abandoned bungalow.

It was in the month of October that he left India to work for a law firm in country xy. The moment the flight took off, he along with others were surrounded by a vast dark nothingness. Surrounded by death, he experienced a strange feeling of solidarity with his fellow co-passengers. Early morning, when his flight was about to land, he could see in the distance the sparkling blue waters of the ocean meeting the bright sky. A yellow crescent-shaped circle of sand was enclosing the water. The sheer beauty struck him. But he knew like all exiles that both the sky and land did not belong to him. His eyes were by now hurting because of sleeplessness. He took his luggage and boarded a spacious bus. As the bus moved, he saw the lonely white-colored minaret of the mosque glowing in the heat of desert like silver. He saw restaurants with names such as Delhi Durbar and Bangladeshi Hotel, which made him slightly happy. It was inside these air-conditioned hotels, as he would learn later, that emigrant men would sit and watch with unblinking eyes and sometimes with moist eyes, the news channels of their country. People even watched advertisements with lively interest, he had observed. For a while he closed his eyes. He could not even remember when he fell asleep on his seat. When he opened his eyes, he saw yellow deserts on both sides. As if to confirm this, his eyes looked out of the driver’s frontal glass. He felt a sharp pain in his heart. It was as if he had a heart attack. A sharp pain rose from somewhere and struck his solitary heart. He now realized that this was not his country. He felt an urge in him. He wanted to run stupidly and reach his home. He consoled himself that he had as a child suffered this feeling of homesickness. But this consolation added to the depth of his pain. As he entered a Pakistani restaurant to eat biryani, his eyes saw a huge framed poster of Jinnah wearing a shirwani and gandhian cap made of fur. He quietly took his meal and left.

It was Friday and he had not turned to the mosque. He had to leave his room quickly so that his colleagues on finding this did not end up interrogating him about his absence. He had decided to travel to a nearby mountainous region. The bus was nearly deserted. An American woman wearing jeans and thick t-shirt sat on her seat with her legs crossed. A young Indian couple with a chubby child sat near her. When his eyes met the woman, she sympathetically smiled at him. It meant, “you too are from India; I know this, so are we.” The bus then left. From his wide windows, he could see tall buildings made up of mirror. Some were pointed as a sharp pencil. The facade of each building reflected the other. When he had seen this army of images for the first time, he thought it was Disney World; but the joy of this realization was short lived. His bus then had reached on the fringe of the city. A blue board announced “labor camps,” which was written in white. Next to it was a desolate flat cemetery unlike the ones that he had ever seen. Workers, as he had learned later, lived there with poverty, solitude and bugs. Once in a while a group of workers would kill another fellow worker and then the whole gang would be mercilessly executed on Fridays. The next day the newspapers would carry a small story. Workers would invariably be blamed for having failed to pay the blood money.

His bus reached the mountainous region. The barren brown mountain stood below the clouds. Shafts of rays were falling on his body, piercing the dark clouds. Small platoons of workers could be seen breaking the mountain. The brown mountains with red sun above them evoked a feeling of longing in him. His mind pictured the smiling face of his M. He thought: there she is on the mountain top. He longed with such an intensity that, to calm his heart, he placed his forehead on the cool glass of the bus. Had someone touched him, he would have fallen on the ground and shattered like a glass. The bus gave such a sudden jerk that his mood disappeared. He tried hard to get back that mood. But he failed. The failure to experience anxiety in turn brought anxiety. Suddenly his eyes caught sight of a tree. A big tree. There it stood. Without leaves. Naked. Solitary. Its bark was light brown. Was it silently awaiting death, he thought. As he could make out, there were many bushes nearby. But the tree as it stood was aloof. Each branch was clear as the blue veins of a cotton-white hand. The tree reminded him about himself. In its essence he saw his….

It was the 6th of December. The country was celebrating its independence day. The school children were marching with the posters of the king and the crown prince. Huge posters of the king covered the facade of almost every building. A happy king smiling on his overtaxed subjects. In some buildings flags long as a road covered the whole facade. One could see poor workers selling flags to small children on every street corner. Had Orwell or Tagore been alive, how they would have seen this great pantomime of nationalism, he asked himself. Freedom here is an abstraction performed in a poet’s restless head; he quietly jotted these words in some remote corner of his mind. As he sat on a wooden stool in a park, he saw spy cameras on top of the buildings in all four directions. They were seeing me, he knew this. Were they aware of his thoughts too? He left with a copy of My name is Red that he had been carrying. He walked towards the canal. Happy Europeans were busy in their abundant world. Some were sipping juice while others were munching chicken. A group of workers wearing dirty Kurta and Paijama were eyeing them.

The next day after he came back from his work. His mind was blank as it had been yesterday and the day before. This made him ashamed of himself. An empty mind he thought, empty as the park he passed. He walked down hurriedly like a thief. He walked towards the public library. It is the only place where he could find peace. Here I am. It is here that I belong. My metaphysical palace. Here I am, amidst my ancestors who will now speak to me. How privileged he felt, to belong to their company. Some day, when I die I shall want to be buried here. Amidst books. Books gave him solace. Here and there, a line would echo and re-echo within his soul, until it would die — suddenly having lost its charm. One of the greatest joys that comes from reading is that, time and again, one would feel that a philosopher like Kierkegaard let’s say, suffered so much humiliation and pain, at the hands of Corsiar, the Danish Church, the college Professors or his fellow Danes, so that in the centuries later to come, when one would be born, one would read him. It was for me that he undertook so much of pain and labor. It was to instruct me in the future that he labored in the past. Hence, what can I feel for him, if not reverence and bonding? After having read for four hours, he came out of the library. The crescent-shape moon just behind the yellow minaret of the beautifully lit mosque caught his attention. Dot-size stars were sparkling in the dark sky. He saw a group of tourists sitting on the top floor of a small ship. Somehow he could not identify with them. Reading had secreted solitude in him. The category of what philosophers call “the other” repelled him with such vehemence and force that he was quite ashamed to admit it before anyone. He walked slowly towards his room. He took the long way, a beautifully lit street that gets flooded with prostitutes every evening. Some stand with folded arms and melancholic eyes. Some give a smile calculated to lure young men with lonely hearts.

One Monday evening, he was reading Sartre’s Nausea. The confused Sartre was explaining his confusion with such clarity that it awed him. The sheer poetry of the text overwhelmed him. He knew that sooner or later, he too would experience the nausea once he delved his heart into the text, or maybe he read the text because he too wanted to experience nausea. He thought Sartre had written the autobiography of his soul, but he also knew in some corner of his mind that it was a lie. After he had finished reading the text. He felt a strong urge to pleasure himself. He quietly went to the bathroom of the library and locked himself. To terrify his self, his mind played that old game, “what if someone catches me,” but a part of him knew that this anxiety enhanced the whole pleasure of the act. He washed his hands and quietly left the library. The same night when he went to bed. He had an anxiety dream. Next morning, when he met me at a cafe, that was once frequented by M.F. Hussain, who would every evening come barefoot and order his paratha and omelette. His eyes were surveying the ships that carry goods. I knew he was looking for our ship Hind.

“Do you know,” he suddenly said, as he looked into my eyes with a conviction of one who is possessed with a truth, “that books can transform you? You end up being what you never were. You end up hating your parents. Your childhood friends no longer understand you. Your parents no longer understand you. You end up hating yourself. You get drunk and write that often I cannot endure my own self. And then, when you wake in the morning you feel embarrassed and also proud for having expressed it.”

I understood what he wanted to say. I expressed my comradeship by being silent for a while and, out of habit, I took a deep breath. I looked fleetingly into his eyes. I understood that he understood that I understood. After a while it started raining. It was the first winter rain. We sat inside the empty restaurant. The light-yellow sands became dark. The pieces of newspapers lying here and there became translucent. Small rivers, like the roots of a tree, appeared everywhere on the sand. For the first time in months, I saw wipers of cabs moving. In the bus stop that was facing our restaurant a group of people stood helplessly. Men with long beards entered our restaurant. Tiny droplets of water were caught in their beards. “It must be raining in our Calcutta too,” he said with a smile on his face. And we both smiled.

“You know, whenever it rains for more than 20 minutes in Calcutta, every street and narrow road become a tributary of Hooghly,” he said.

I smiled and added, “once I saw a poor worker sleeping under the rain with a blue plastic covering his body, while I was walking near the Burra Masjid area.”

When the streets are flooded in Calcutta, school children wearing white ribbons in their hairs are seen happily wading through the water. Old men sit and drink tea all day long in one of those dilapidated tea stalls: simultaneously cursing the government and god. I remembered having read an article by a certain journalist, which said “the cacophony of the politicians begins with the first droplets of rain in our city.” When the rain halted abruptly we both came out. The air smelled of sweet earthen mud. The view of the canal was crystal clear. White birds appeared suddenly from nowhere. We both could see the birds taking swift glides towards the surface of water to get hold of their prey. And from the surface of water they would rise like a kite. I so badly wanted to wet his lips with mine. I knew he too wanted to lick my lips. But I thought the kiss would offend him. And he thought the same thought at the same time.

“Listen, he said, will you come tomorrow evening at this place?”

“Why? Is there anything you want to talk about? You can do so now.”

“No, we will talk about it tomorrow.”

“Okay. Then see you tomorrow.”

We parted.

I opened my door, which creaked so distinctly. I then placed my key on my table and walked straight to my kitchen. I heard the dragging of my footsteps. The refrigerator hummed loudly when I opened its door. I could hear the sound of the speeding cars that abruptly passed by my window. Slowly the sound would become faint and die. I opened my vodka and drank it. With each gulp my head became more violent. I was in such a state that I was unable to pursue any topic beyond a few seconds. A multitude of voices raged in my head. To feel tranquility, I got up and went to my balcony. I could see the full disk of white. The moon. On observing it, I realized that it was not a full moon, but a slight part of its base had eclipsed. When you look at the moon you look at your  inner self, I thought. In the distant corner, a row of tall buildings stood hazily in the smog. A solitary lamppost burned dimly, like a smouldering ball of fire. Black crows appeared on the sky. Their shadows were flying. I gulped a few more glasses of vodka and went to bed. I saw in my dream that I was drinking water. I knew from my past experiences that it was a dream but could never halt the dream of my own accord and wake up. When I woke up in the midnight my throat was dried. I drank water and went to my bed again. I woke up in the morning and sat on my sofa with my book. It was as if every page that I read was forgotten before I could finish it. In my anger I threw my book on my sofa.

When I arrived at the cafeteria I found my cousin brother. He was speaking over the phone and smoking his cigarette. On seeing him, I was compelled to stretch my lips. We shook hands like diplomats.

“So what are you reading these days,” he asked.

“Nothing.”.

“Why?” He exclaimed with a sarcastic smile evident on his face.

“I am equally happy at times when I don’t read. Besides, too much of reading gives you a severe headache.”

“Ha…haha… this is why I say. Stay like me, you will be happier.”

“Happiness without a cause is ephemeral,” I snapped back forcefully like a typical lawyer.

We sat silently for a long while. I did not feel any urge to speak. He had nothing to talk about, given his learning. He broke his silence after a while.

“The brotherhood has won the elections in Egypt; soon they will spread their tentacles in the rest. Europe will become an Islamic continent. And so will India. These Christians have had their day. Their immorality will soon be wiped from the face of this earth by the swords of our warriors. All this I tell you is the sign of Doomsday. See the economic crisis, the poverty, the helplessness of our brothers and sisters. It is a curse of our god on these infidels. What do you say?”

“Your insanity is so patent, I need not say a word.”

“Why do you always take their side, he asked in a disappointed tone.”

“I cannot forgive the west for what they have done to our people in Vietnam, Iraq, Cuba, and Afghanistan or any other poor country. But I cannot forget that they have given us Chaplin, Nietzsche, Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir. If the east has given them Algebra, they have given us laptops and phones,” I said.

Angrily I got up and left the place. Suddenly I remembered that I had forgotten about her. I went near the canal and sat. If my one eye belongs to the east the other belongs to the west. The immensity of the horizon enlarges when we look at it with both our eyes, I thought.

Fifteen years after a sudden absence, one day I received a letter. It was from him. He had settled in Darjeeling. He stayed alone in a rented room. For the greater part of the day, he would read. After quitting his job he had decided to live alone. It was during those days that I found him writing a book. It was titled “Poets and Governments.” He had explained to me on several occasions that governments of all political shades exploit the works of poets to maintain their discursive power; repressive governments are poetically eloquent.

I remember the day I visited his solitary house. I had on purpose worn a red sweater. My big breast was swollen with pride. I knew that that night he was mine. We made love like wild animals. We swore to stand by each other for centuries to come. But by morning it was all over. I felt so ashamed of myself. He woke up and pressed his face to my breast. We both stayed on the bed, coiled like worms for a long time. He then said, “you know I was so garrulous when I was alone; a part of my mind was always busy talking to someone.”

“Did you ever remember me,” I asked.

“Sometimes,” he said, looking vaguely at the ceiling. He left the bed suddenly and went outside to buy a pack of cigarette. It was then that I found the page written by him that you read at the beginning.

Editor’s Notes: Imtiaz Akhtar has a law degree and is pursuing a master’s degree in comparative literature at Jadavpur University in Kolkata (Calcutta) India. He has worked as a journalist, as a lawyer and as an editor for a law journal. He lives in Kolkata, India. This story is a finalist in the News Junkie Post short-story competition. The competition is still open; submit your entry. Photographs one, two, six and eight by Cory Doctorow. Photographs seven and nine by Henri Cartier-Bresson.

By Gilbert Mercier and Dady Chery

We might never learn the motive behind the Boston Marathon bomb attack on Monday, April 15, which is reported to have killed three people and injured more than 170. It could be as simple as an unhinged individual going postal on tax day or a sinister  message to Americans from a foreign national illustrating the proverb “You can run, but you can’t hide.” In any case, the improvised explosive devices (IED) were amateurish and ineffective at causing maximum casualty. According to investigators, the crude IED were made from rigged pressure cookers loaded with gunpowder, nails plus ball bearings, and triggered by egg timers. The clumsy work suggests an unbalanced individual rather than an organization. Nevertheless, all day Monday and Tuesday the United States and world media talked about a “terrorist attack,” and the story became the only story. What matters more, however, is the way the incident will be exploited worldwide by policy makers and their media sycophants.

Boosting fear and paranoia to reinforce the global police state

Overall, the tragedy is a minor incident in the scope of world affairs. Around the same time: in Iraq for example, a wave of bomb attacks killed 50 people and injured 300; in Afghanistan, 30 people at wedding party were killed and about 90 wounded because a US bomb missed its target. Nevertheless the Boston bombing has already raised the level of fear and paranoia. Just like 9/11 was used to justify the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the start of the global war on terror, the Boston Marathon incident will be exploited by repressive governments to justify an ever-growing war economy that benefits the industrial-military complex. Private security and surveillance companies will thrive even more, and US citizens may expect the Department of Homeland Security to grow into a bigger monstrosity. One can easily foresee that, at upcoming big crowd gatherings such as sporting events, drones of  all functions, shapes and sizes — some presumably designed to look like hummingbirds — will fly overhead to protect us from ourselves. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, many young Americans joined the military with the fervor of naive patriotism. With unemployment still high, it is likely that the Boston marathon incident will lure more young men and women into becoming cannon fodder for the war machine.

A story to hide others: Guantanamo, CISPA and Bradley Manning

Before the Marathon incident, the top news stories in the United States suggested that Americans might be regaining their senses and worrying about the erosion of their civil liberties. A foremost concern was the free dissemination of information and protection of privacy. Earlier this year, the Cyber Intelligence Protection Act (CISPA) was reset into motion by an executive order and a vow from President Barack Obama, during his State of the Union address, to “strengthen cyber defenses by increasing information sharing.” CISPA is about to be put to a vote in the House of Representatives. If passed in its current state, it will allow companies to collect the confidential e-mail and web-browsing histories of private individuals and share the information with the government, including its military and intelligence agencies, ostensibly to counter cyber threats.

To the US government, the epitome of a cyber threat is Pfc Bradley Manning. Mr. Manning has been detained for over a year without trial and more than 1,000 days without a conviction for blowing the whistle about US attacks on Iraqi and Afghan civilians. He is charged with espionage, not because he knowingly shared classified information with a foreign agent but because some of his information was published online and might have been used by a hostile foreign agent for some unspecified nefarious purpose. Mr. Manning enjoys considerable sympathy, and it is not lost on the internet community that some of the charges against him represent an attack on all online publishers, who obviously have no control over who uses their information.

For what seemed to be the first time since 9/11, Americans began again to express publicly their sympathy toward some Muslim foreign nationals. In a New York Times editorial of April 14 that was exceptional for allowing an incarcerated Muslim to present his plight directly to the US public, Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel detailed some of the horrors he suffered in Guantanamo during his 11 years of detention there without trial. The story was damning. More than half of the 166 prisoners at Guantanamo are on a little-publicized hunger strike that started over two months ago, and 16 of them, including Moqbel, are being force fed. One man weighs only 77 pounds. Moqbel, whose weight has dropped to 132 pounds, describes that: “During one force-feeding the nurse pushed the tube about 18 inches into my stomach, hurting me more than usual…. It was so painful that I begged them to stop feeding me. The nurse refused…. When they come to force me into the chair, if I refuse to be tied up, they call the E.R.F. [Extreme Reaction Force] team. So I have a choice. Either I can exercise my right to protest my detention, and be beaten up, or I can submit to painful force-feeding.”

Comments about the editorial were overwhelmingly sympathetic; the readers recognized, not only that prisoners everywhere are entitled to decent treatment, but also that Moqbel, in particular, has never been charged with or found guilty of anything. This outpouring of sympathy stopped as suddenly as the Boston Marathon explosions, which are presumed, without proof, to have been orchestrated by a Muslim.

International ramifications either real or manufactured

There are already some alarming signs of the ways the Boston Marathon tragedy might be used in a broader geopolitical context. On Wednesday, April 17, The Times of Israel  announced that police chief Yohanan Danino and “other police officers” left the Jewish state on Tuesday to help the FBI with the Boston Marathon investigation. This is the highest ranking police delegation ever sent overseas by Israel. President Shimon Peres, during a foreign diplomatic gathering, expressed his condolences and jumped on the opportunity to crank up the terror narrative. “Today the real problem is terror, and terror is not an extension of policy: their policy is terror, their policy is to threaten. Terrorists divide people, they kill innocent people,” said Peres.

This intrusion of Israel into an investigation that the FBI should handle with the Boston Police indicates that the case will likely expand. Allegations — legitimate or not — might soon materialize to link the case to Iran or organizations like Hezbollah. To keep the global war on terror in the limelight is to lull the public into docility despite the continuous assaults on its civil liberties and human rights. So long as terror can regain its place as the number one public-opinion priority, CISPA may be implemented with the blessings of a large majority of US citizens, Bradley Manning may stay in prison, and Guantanamo may remain open.

Editor’s Note: All photographs by Aaron Tang.

The housing divide

Who knows, perhaps Thatcher naively and seriously thought that everybody, by following the capitalist dream, could become rich. Anybody can see, die-hard bankers especially, that such a society could never exist under a capitalist system. Robert Tressell clearly shows how this system functions in The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, in a chapter called “The Great Money Trick.” There need to be factors of production to make the capitalist system work. This is why there is a one percent super-rich sector and the other 99 percent are destined to make their way through life as best they can. Many working-class people bought into the dream, buying their council houses below market value and quite probably thinking this was great when they came to sell these houses at a more realistic market value. This conjurer’s trick can only be worked once. It left in its wake a vast shortage of social housing and a populace of young people unable to afford a house, together with councils that are in debt because they have been robbed of their assets.

The financial divide

Likewise a dream of Thatcher’s — nightmare might be a better word — was to privatize pensions. People were bribed with £200 (paid from the state pension scheme) to contract out and invest in private pensions, because capitalists know better how to make your money grow. Most of the private schemes failed. So those without a proper pension came back into the state pension scheme. They did not pay £200 plus interest to get back in. The state pension scheme had remained solvent. It was not run by shady capitalists whose main motivation was how much profit they could screw you for.  Contributions paid into private pension schemes lined the pockets of the capitalists. The state pension scheme saw none of this; however, pensions paid to those who returned because they would otherwise have been without a pension, are today paid out of the state pension scheme, although they are entitled to some pension for the contributions they made. Similarly when banks go bust, taxpayers, who all economists know, provide most of the liquidity that enables banks to operate, are forced to bail them out. That is, unless there is a chance they might recover and provide profit to the rich. Even when banks continue to fail, bankers are paid disgusting bonuses at taxpayers expense.

The military divide

Thatcher was the first post second world-war prime minister to take us into war. It was an unnecessary war. A peace deal was on the table, but she chose to have Argentinian and British troops killed to bolster her flagging popularity. Because collectively the electorate is stupid — there can be no other word for it — she sailed back into power on the tidal wave created by the loss of these young lives. Every single prime minister since, of both main parties, and the coalitionist Nick Clegg, have taken us into unnecessary wars. Thatcher showed them the way. None of them has been big enough to say “No.” The electorate continues to support these wars. The world is in debt. The wars, which enrich capitalists, have caused this debt, which the rest of us will have to pay.

A fitting epitaph

Margaret Thatcher is dead. I shall not be dancing on the day of her funeral, another pompous affair aimed at brainwashing those sheep who have never read George Orwell’s Animal Farm. I shall not be having a street party in remembrance of her divisive policies. Instead I have combined the two mottoes from the introductory paragraph into a fitting epitaph to the old lady who did so much harm to my country.

Editor’s Note: Photograph one by BBC Radio 4. Photographs two and three by Duncan C. Photograph four by Noaz and photograph five by R. Barraez D’ Lucca.

By Dady Chery and Gilbert Mercier

The expression “Time is money” was coined by Benjamin Franklin. It is a relatively new saying, among countless others, that represents the rot that started to eat at the core of our global social edifice during the industrial revolution. With the exchange of clock hours for money began the notion of time as being an entity independent of any natural phenomenon. Such a concept is still absent from some cultures like that of the Amondawa, a rare Amazonian tribe that had the luck to remain isolated from modernity. Of course, the Amondawa understand the idea of meeting somebody at sunset, or tomorrow, but time as something with a value per hour that may be traded for goods and services is unknown to them.

Once the capitalist equation “time = money” kicked in as a social golden rule, life progressively turned into death on an installment plan. For thousands of years before this, human societies, independently of their locations, closely followed the rhythms of nature with immense respect. One did not clock in, but one was aware of the sunrise, sunset, and phase of the moon. The seasons guided the kind of work to be done, and factors such as the tides, atmospheric conditions, actions of other living things, determined the day’s agenda. This delicate harmony with our natural world has been put in jeopardy by the arrogance and stupidity of our anthropocentric tunnel vision: the notion that the Earth and its other inhabitants exist to serve us. The idea of putting a price tag on nature’s services, for example, based on the time that is saved by humans, is an insane concept that belongs distinctly to our age. We have lost our compass. Global capitalism has uprooted us and time from nature to make of us slaves who chase after immortality in the form of money: a morbid illusion.

Money is the ultimate addiction. If alcoholics and drug addicts can seek help and are often obliged to do so by the courts, the addicts to money accumulation are revered and put on a pedestal. For global capitalism, only “money talks,” and it does so with the astounding power of a giant bullhorn. The likes of Warren Buffet and George Soros are the deus ex-machina of the money worshipers. These two titans of global investment are regarded as geniuses, yet their only talent is to make money with money. Do they produce tangible goods and services? No. Do they genuinely dedicate their energies to the improvement of the overall human condition? No.

In fact, the super-rich are those who raise the disease of miserliness to a high art. In his book The Art of Being, published posthumously to avoid misunderstandings, psychologist Erich Fromm introduced the notion of the rich miser and described this pathology in its details. A notorious example was the automobile manufacturer Henry Ford, who is reputed to have worn each pair of his socks continuously until they were so tattered, they could no longer be mended. Overall, rich misers, despite their sometimes impressive demonstrations of philanthropy as an image for public consumption, suffer from an inability to let go of things such as their energies, thoughts, words, and quite commonly their semen and stools. Yet they, with their impotence and constipation, successfully manage to persuade countless disciples that nothing is valuable if it is not expensively bought or sold.

By the above analysis, dear reader, this article is of no value because you did not buy it in a glossy magazine. More insidious than this, the values of rich misers are continually imposed on the world through the adoption of parameters such as GDP growth, which measures the increased flow of money through an economy, as being the definition of wealth.  Thus real wealth becomes confused with money, and as people get more alienated from each other and the natural world, they become defined by what they have rather than what they are. Any society may be viewed as being terminally ill when money assets come to define the value of a person.

While those few who hold vast sums of money may be heard through countless channels and leverage their influence on public discourse into power, the vast majority of humans scramble for survival and go unheard. Currently the mega-rich and their banks such as the IMF and World Bank casually impose their diktats on individuals and nations alike. Cyprus has caved in; soon it will be Egypt, which is on the verge of insolvency. Where political power runs amok in its permanent quest for profit, extreme money concentration induces a systemic disaster. Those who do the bidding for the rich race like rats spinning in a wheel who are bent on powering the implement for their destruction. “I can’t quit the rat race, because I have kids to feed and a mortgage to pay,” they say. But this is a cop out, and the rat race is relayed from one generation to the next. As this complex game of chess between rich and poor is played out, pawns, king and queen risk winding up in the same box.

The Cree Indian proverb “When the last tree has died, the last river has been poisoned, and the last fish has been caught, we will realize that we cannot eat money” provides a wiser perspective on the grim reality that widespread greed is creating for us. This Cree scenario of doom will be on our horizon probably within two decades, partly because those of us who say that we wish to “Save the Planet” are as arrogant as those who are bent on destroying the environment for their short-term gains. The planet has seen several mass extinctions; new species will spring up, quite without us. Realistically put, our goal at best is to save human kind from becoming an index species: the sort that enjoys tremendous success, but over such a brief period that its fossils ultimately serve to mark a geological era. To save ourselves, we must understand with a devoutness stronger than for any organized religion, that we exist at the pleasure of the other living beings on Earth. We must appreciate that we subsist, not because of our cleverness as an isolated species but our membership in a delicately-balanced living ensemble.

Editor’s Note: All photographs by ‘Tax Credits’.